Monster
by Roadstergal
Summary: An arc of ficlets in the same AU, covering time from Series V through VII. The story is RimmerLister slash. Contains some violence, some sex, one incident of noncon.
1. Chapter 1

It's hard to know whether this is an overall improvement or worsening of the normal moonhopping situation, Rimmer pondered. On the one hand, he was spared the android's pedantic knowledge of Space Corps regulations and a rather selective application thereof. On the other hand, he had to share the cabin with Lister, whose personal habits would make a hippopotamus turn up its nose in disgust. Pondering this metaphysical dilemma kept him happily entertained as they plowed through the vacuum, and Lister was busy filling out the Do You Know How To Please A Man? quiz in Cosmonautpolitan. Their target was not far, and the route was clear, so there was little else to do.

"Lister..."

"Wha?" asked Lister, not looking up from the magazine.

"Why do you fill out the women's quizzes?"

"I've done the men's quizzes twenty times already. 'When you're having that quiet dinner and you feel like you're approaching that Sexy Moment, do you a) Change the subject - you're a good girl! b) Take his lead and see what he wants, or c) Make your move before you lose the moment?' Definitely c. I bet I'm going to be one sexy momma."

Rimmer sighed and looked out the viewscreen at the unchanging starscape. "I don't know why you wanted to go moonhopping with me. Kryten is perfectly willing to be my hands." It irritated him to no end that he couldn't fend for himself in this.

"I need to stretch me legs. Breathe a little unrecycled air."

"You'd better hope it has an atmosphere." A bright crescent off to the side of the viewscreen was becoming noticeably bigger. They were approaching from the day side, thank goodness. If there's one thing worse than landing on a strange and potentially hostile planet, it's doing it at night.

xxxxxx

The planet was rocky, but otherwise featureless. Starbug settled gently on an outcropping. Rimmer gave silent thanks that Lister was absorbed in the Secret Sex Tips feature and let Holly do the landing. There was nothing gentle about a Lister landing.

Lister shouldered past Rimmer as the hologram started down the gangplank. He noticed that Lister looked nervous; the last man alive was most likely worried that Rimmer was going to sing all 23 verses of the Space Corps anthem in order to claim the planet. He would be correct about that. Rimmer cleared his throat.

And the ground began to shake.

"What the smeg?" he gasped, trying to keep his feet on the gangplank. Lister lay down on the ground as it shook and tossed; he seemed remarkably sanguine. Rimmer was not, however; he instinctively tried to grab the rail with insubstantial hands as an upthrust of rock knocked Starbug spinning. He fell off of the ramp as a shoulder from that upthrust passed through his soft-light body with a crackle of energy, and the world went dark.

It must have been moments later that he came to; the ground was still heaving, and Starbug was dancing to a halt half a kilometer or so to the side. The outcroppings of rock had started to pull back into the earth, revealing a different side of themselves to the double yellow sun.

Rimmer checked his body; it looked normal enough. The rock must have knocked his light bee for a loop, causing a reboot. He checked the footing for his red-clad legs and stood. Starbug looked intact; it was a tough bugger to dent. Rimmer immediately made for it. He had not seen a bloody pulp in the vicinity, so Lister must either be nominal or beyond hope; the scanners in Starbug would tell him more. As he walked to Starbug, he looked with surprise at the landscape that had been bare rock. Grass was springing up from black, loamy earth at an impossible rate. Off in the distance, he saw gnarled trees, branchless up to their tips (he recognized them as baobabs from pictures in a book he once read by a French bloke). Birds appeared from out of nowhere to twitter melodiously.

Something was horribly wrong. Rimmer ran the rest of the way back to Starbug. Once inside, he called, "Holly!"

Nothing happened. The tumble Starbug took must have made the safeties shut down all systems. They needed a manual override. Out of habit, Rimmer reached for the controls to start the systems back up - and his hand went through the console. Bugger.

He frowned and tapped his foot. His frown deepened when it made no noise. How the hell was he going to get out of here?

He would just have to find Lister the hard way. And hope he was alive enough to restart Starbug's systems.

Rimmer headed back out. He stopped at the top of the gangplank and looked, slowly, at the view that vantage point afforded. Whatever process that had started with the quake had apparently run its course. The ground was covered in a thick, verdant lawn of wild grasses, spotted with colorful wildflowers; it stretched up to a rough circle about fifty meters from Starbug, and stopped there in favor of the dull rock that had been the planet when they first landed. Puffy white clouds floated across a deep blue sky. Songbirds flitted by on brilliantly colored wings.

And something sparkled on the ground.

Rimmer descended to the ground and trotted across the meadow towards it. It was a beer can. Lager. Lister's favorite.

Had he somehow smuggled it down the gangplank? Where on Io had he put it? He couldn't have just happened to find it lying around on the planet. That was ludicrous. As ludicrous as bare rock turning to meadow. Rimmer's grimace deepened even more.

The springy grass left traces, though. He saw faint footprints in them, leading off towards the distant trees. Lister was alive, then, and mobile - and he had simply run away from Starbug like a gazelle given a standing ovation at the first sign of danger. Rimmer snorted. He'd have to find Lister in order to get out of here.

He set off, following Lister's footprints. Despite himself, he began to relax. It truly was a beautiful day on a beautiful planet. The grass was soft and springy below his feet, and the underlying loam was delightfully cool. The sun warmed his bare back...

Wait.

He shouldn't be able to feel anything.

Rimmer touched his forehead. The H was gone. He reached down and tugged a blade of grass; it came out in his fingers. His feet were bare; in fact, most of him was bare. He wore nothing but a loincloth.

But - he could touch! Whatever the reason, he was real here. He turned around and ran back for Starbug. He could get out of here!

Rimmer reached the circle of rock surrounding Starbug - and stopped. Once he left the grass, he converted immediately back to hologrammatic form. The difference was night and day - or life and afterlife. He crossed back and forth from grass to rock; on rock he was a hologram, and on grass he wasn't.

Bugger.

He turned and resumed his pursuit of Lister's tracks grimly. His physicality was linked to the terraforming that had occurred. He knew now what had happened; they had found another psi-moon. This one had molded itself to Lister's mind instead, and it annoyed him to no end that the end result was so much more beautiful than the landscape of his own mind.

Well, with a physical body, at least he'd be able to punch Lister when he found the goit.

xxxxxx

The tracks often disappeared altogether, but as long as Rimmer continued to head towards the forest, he kept rediscovering the trail. For whatever reason, that had been Lister's destination. It was farther away than Rimmer had initially thought - baobabs must be _huge_. He had thought them about chest-high when he first saw the pictures, but from the way they continued to grow, they must be taller than a man. He swallowed nervously.

xxxxxx

They were many times the height of a man by the time he reached them, with trunks he could not put his arms around. If he had any desire for intimacy with a strange Earth species, that is, which he did not. A trail that snaked through the monstrosities was visible once he reached the edge of the forest. He looked around in apprehension. The thick, interlacing tops obscured the sun, and strange noises came from the depths. He could, he thought, wait in the meadow instead for Lister to emerge; it was a much more inviting locale than this one. But he had no reason to believe Lister would emerge, or would emerge from this side. He fortified himself with thoughts of the jolly good telling-off he would give Lister once he found the gimboid, and walked into the forest.

Ten minutes later, the rehearsed speeches had run their course, and he was becoming increasingly nervous. The ground was no longer soft; sticks and rocks stuck up from clayey soil, poking at his bare feet and making him stumble. The strange sounds had gotten louder, and he would swear that the noises were gasps and moans. From his readings, this was not the normal complement of noises one would find in a forest.

What ghastly metaphor had he wandered into?

He turned his head nervously to look behind him - and then whirled around completely. The trail that he had followed into this forest was gone, and only trees stood behind him.

_Smeg._

He decided that it was time to do what he did best in the face of danger. Panic and whimper. He backed up against a tree trunk, his eyes wild, and slipped down it to land on the ground with a thunk.

He was half-naked, dangerously real, and trapped in some godawful corner of Lister's mind. And handcuffed.

Handcuffed?

His hands were abruptly yanked above his head, and he was hauled to his feet by a dual presence behind him. He looked frantically left and right; tall, broad-shouldered black beings with red eyes stood on either side of him and slightly behind, hauling his cuffed hands up to fasten them to the marble column that the tree behind him had suddenly become. He could either stand on his tiptoes or hang from his wrists, and he shifted uncomfortably from one to the other.

The beings stepped in front of him and turned their unconvincing, yet suitably terrifying, red eyes on him. They studied him like scientists scanning a petri dish with an unusual culture of mold growing on it, then turned to each other and nodded, slowly.

They turned and walked off into the forest, disappearing into the blackness. Rimmer twisted his hands to try to extricate them from the cuffs, but they were fastened too tightly. And they were attached to the marble column as if it had formed spontaneously around them.

What the hell was going on?

Well, if this was to be a repeat of the previous experience, he hoped he would at least have the same handmaidens.

As if on cue, the two long-limbed, white-haired maidens appeared from nowhere behind him and stepped delicately in front of him. One poured oil into a basin in the other's hands from two silver-embossed crystal ewers; they both set down their loads and began to rub oil from the basin over his body. He closed his eyes and tried to enjoy the experience, not thinking of what was to follow, as they rubbed their long-fingered hands over his chest, up his arms, down his thighs, refilling their hands frequently from the basin until he was glisteningly slick all over. As before, the oil was sweetly scented, and annoyingly full of sawdust and splinters from the wooden basin.

It was all becoming clear to him. Lister had enjoyed watching him tortured on the last psi-moon, and when he had dared to intrude on Lister's little paradise, he had set up an encore.

"I suppose," he said, reluctantly turning his thoughts to the next stage as the handmaidens toyed with his nipples, "that the Master wishes me oiled to better conduct the electricity..."

"Oh, no," said the maiden on his right in a low, sultry voice.

"His plans are facilitated by you being slippery and pliant," said the other, as she slipped one oiled hand where only customs officials dared to probe. Rimmer's heart leapt into his throat. He sputtered and coughed to try to evict it as they picked up their dishes and started to walk away.

"Wait! I... er... there's been an awful... wait!" The last came out as a squeak as their white forms faded to nothing. Rimmer began to wrench at his handcuffs in earnest as his heart, unsuccessful at the oral escape route, tried to push out of his chest.

He froze as the ground began to rumble. A dome of soil bulged up from a clearing that had suddenly formed in front of him. The dome rose higher, to just above Rimmer's height, and the soil fell away from a vaguely humanoid form.

Vaguely.

It had two legs, two arms, and one head. Its skin was dark, almost black, and scaly. It had a head from a nightmare; a triangular nose like a dog's that was all mouth, with two red slits for eyes above it. It had a broad torso, and below it, an enormous...

er...

Rimmer returned to the study of its head. Two thick strands, almost hairlike, fell from its otherwise bald, dark, and scaly head down to its waist. Its red, slitted eyes focused on Rimmer, and it reached out to grab his face between two of its four fingers. Long, sharp nails dug into Rimmer's temple as it forced his head upwards to meet its intense red gaze. The corners of its mouth curled up in an evil smile, and its lips parted to reveal the tips of sharp teeth. A long, red tongue emerged, and licked Rimmer's cheek, leaving a trail of thick saliva in its wake.

"Why are you being so horrible to me?" He was immediately sorry he spoke, as his voice wavered and trembled pathetically.

The grin disappeared. "Horrible?" Its voice was deep and raspy, like a demon that dined on broken glass. The creature put its mouth near Rimmer's ear and growled, "You haven't seen horrible yet."

It reached over Rimmer's head and grabbed the handcuffs. The marble column behind Rimmer reformed, releasing the cuffs. The creature spun Rimmer around; he was now facing a flat marble slab with an ornate base, very like an altar. It pushed Rimmer forwards, forcing him to bend over the waist-high slab, and slammed the cuffs into the marble again, pulling Rimmer far forward. He tried to kick, but the creature pinned his ankles with one froglike foot. It traced one nail down his back, drawing blood, and hooked it into the loincloth, ripping the cloth apart and tossing it away.

It leaned down until it was breathing in Rimmer's ear. "Lovely." It licked the scratch down his back with that long tongue, grabbed his shoulder with a grip of iron, and shoved that huge... thing... inside of him. Rimmer screamed and flailed, but was now pinned by the weight of the beast as it pounded at him, licking and nipping his exposed back and arms.

If this is what it's like for women, some dispassionate part of Rimmer's brain observed, no wonder I'm not getting any.

The monster finally climaxed with a deep thrust and a long, bestial howl. It might have been ten minutes or a hundred years; Rimmer's voice had gone hoarse from screaming. Then it disappeared, dissipating into mist along with the alter and handcuffs. Rimmer fell face-first into the soft soil, and drifted off into a haze.

He was brought out of it by an irritating prod at his sore shoulder. "Rimmer. Rimmer, man, you OK?"

"Piss off," he muttered into the dirt.

The prodding became more insistent. "C'mon, Rimmer, we need to get outta here."

Rimmer snapped alert with the realization that he was stark naked and bleeding from any number of places, including one rather intimate one, in front of Lister. _Hell_. "I'll wait here," he muttered, trying to rearrange himself in a more decorous manner.

"We have to move, man." Lister's voice was unusually quiet and grim. He hauled on Rimmer's arm, bringing Rimmer reluctantly to his knees.

The forest was gone. The meadow that had been so lush and green before was brown, rotting away before their eyes. The double sunset filtered murkily through a thick haze at the horizon. Starbug was visible in the distance - barely.

"C'mon, man," Lister urged in that oddly quiet voice. "Move."

Rimmer's legs would not obey him, so Lister pulled Rimmer's arm over his shoulders and half-hauled him across the dying grass. The suns disappeared over the horizon, and the temperature dropped precipitously. They staggered, shivering, towards the hulk of green metal that squatted on its rocky perch.

Once they crossed the perimeter surrounding Starbug, the nothingness that is being a soft-light hologram returned. Rimmer never knew feeling nothing could be so sweet. His arm passed through Lister, and he straightened and spun to face the shorter man. Explanation time.

"_Now_, miladdo..."

"Not now, Rimmer," Lister muttered, his voice tight. He walked through Rimmer and up the gangplank.

Rimmer's nostrils flared in acute irritation. He had the kind of day that would make Mother Teresa kick babies, and now he had to put up with a tantrum of Lister's? He stormed up the gangplank.

Lister was starting up the systems and initiating the launch sequence. Rimmer stood behind him, his foot tapping noiselessly on the deck. Things were starting to fall in place for him, and he wasn't liking any of them.

"You knew it was a psi-moon."

"Yeah," said Lister, as Starbug rose from the moon and prepared to swing around on a home course. "Holly told me about psi-moons. She said that they form in clusters, and where yeh find one, yeh usually find a bunch."

"And that's why you wanted to go moonhopping with me."

"I wanted to have a little taste of Earth again. I thought I could control the terraform. Man!" He turned to Rimmer. "I wanted to feel grass again! See a bird, see a tree, see a cloud! I haven't seen anything like that in three million and fifteen years!"

"You couldn't have _told_ me about this little plan of yours."

"You wouldn't have gone for it."

Rimmer snorted. "And you proved me wrong there, didn't you, squire? Well done. What's your encore, smearing me in honey and poking a yellowjacket nest?" Lister turned to face the viewscreen. "You just couldn't keep a your sweet normal mindscape when I tried to intrude, could you?" continued Rimmer, in full snark mode. "No, you had to toss me to your... your..."

Many more things fell into place with a sickening crunch.

"...lust-monster." his voice tailed off. A long silence followed as Lister continued to stare out of the view screen.

"I..." Lister's voice squeaked. He cleared his throat and tried again. "I can't tell you how long I've wanted to bugger that stupid smirk right offa your face."

They both looked out at the unchanging starscape, until Rimmer turned and left Lister alone with his thoughts.


	2. Fear

"Turn."

Lister grunted as he made a mis-stitch. He put his knitting needles down and started to pick it out.

"Turn."

He glanced over at Rimmer, who sat on the other side of the small folding table they had erected in the sleeping quarters, reading an electronic book in voice-activated mode; the hologram's brow was knitted in concentration. Lister turned back to his knot of yarn.

"Turn."

Lister finally pulled the mis-stitch out, picked the needles back up, and resumed knitting. He supposed he would have to decide at some point what it was going to be; the action soothed him, but the result was getting to be an unmanageable multicolored blob.

"Turn."

Lister sighed and looked up. "You _do_ have a hard-light drive, mate. Kryters said it even uses less energy than your soft-light drive. Yeh can turn your own bloody pages."

"I prefer it this way," Rimmer said, shortly.

Lister looked up from his knitting. "Are you nuts? Yeh did nuttin' but whinge about never being able to touch when you were soft-light, and now you prefer it?"

"Yes. Turn."

Lister looked up from his knitting and studied the red-clad hologram a little more closely. There was tension around his eyes and shoulders that Lister couldn't reconcile with sitting and reading. He put down his knitting and walked around the table to stand in front of Rimmer. "What crawled up yer arse and died?"

Rimmer's head jerked up, and his eyes narrowed as he looked at Lister. "Nothing, miladdo." He jumped to his feet, converting to hard light with a soft fwup of energy as he did so, and slapped the door release button just before he stormed out, brushing past a startled Cat.

"Goalpost head isn't in on poker night?" asked Cat, pointing a thumb over his shoulder as he walked into the room. Kryten sashayed in on his heels. "Guess not," said Lister, stashing his knitting away and pulling the deck of cards from under his pillow.

"No strip poker tonight, though, bud," said Cat, flicking his collar. "I couldn't bear to deny you the sight of me in this." It was a silver spacesuit he had salvaged from a dead crewman on a derelict, and painstakingly sewed by hand into a high-necked bodysuit. It looked dashing with a maroon smoking jacket over the top, but what of Cat's did not?

"Fine," said Lister. "Kryten always looses too quickly, anyway. For cigs or beer?"

"I have none of either, Mister Lister," said Kryten, "But I did find a large shipment of nitrous oxide on the last derelict." He pulled a bunch of colorful balloons from behind his back.

"Bru'al!" Lister grinned. "That'll do."

xxxxxx

Three hours later, Kryten stepped into the cockpit. Rimmer sat back in his chair, putting down the book he had been reading.  
"Changeover, sir."

"Nothing to report. How was the poker game?"

"I lost everything, Mister Rimmer." Somehow, the android didn't seem upset about this. He sat down at his usual station.

"Well done, Kryters," said Rimmer. He put in a bookmark, closed his book, and headed back to the midsection to continue reading.

Cat was sitting in the midsection, and glared at Rimmer with his teeth bared when the hologram walked in. The kitty must have lost a bundle to be in a mood like that. Discretion being rather a specialty of Rimmer's, he continued walking and headed for the sleeping quarters.

xxxxxx

Lister looked up as the door hissed open and Rimmer walked in. "From the looks of the Cat, you cleaned up."

Lister cleared his throat and hoped that enough time had passed. "Not really." His voice came out as a ludicrously high-pitched squeak. _Damn._

Rimmer stopped. "What the smeg is wrong with you?"

"Well," Lister cringed at the warble that came floating out of his mouth, "Cat and I both won big. We got all of the nitrous oxide that Kryten had salvaged, and thought we'd have a bash with it."

"And?"

"It wasn't nitrous. It was helium."

Rimmer sniggered.

"Oh, shut up, Rimmer." Lister realized that his comment sounded hilariously petulant in his high-pitched voice, and that made him only that much more sullen. He cleared his throat again, pleased that the pitch seemed to be dropping, and pulled out his knitting.

Rimmer walked across to the other side of the room, pulled his electronic book off of his bunk, and set it back down on the table. He switched it to voice-activated mode, turned to soft-light with a gentle whump, and started to read.

"Turn."

Lister dropped his knitting on the table. "Why do yeh _do_ that, man? It's smegging annoying, and you don't _have_ to."

"I don't trust you, Listy," Rimmer said, not looking up.

"You don't _trust_ me? What are you on about?"

"The..." Rimmer stopped abruptly. "Nothing."

"Well, it obviously ain't nothin', so tell me!" Lister got out of his chair, grabbed the electronic book, tossed it back on Rimmer's bunk, folded his arms, and met the hologram's glare with a steady gaze of his own.

"Is your memory _that_ short, Listy? Cast your twelve remaining brain cells back and see if _anything_ comes to mind that could _possibly_ cause just a little bit of mistrust, mm?" His eyebrows lifted.

"The psi-moon."

"Yes! Ten points to Lister! Now give me my book back."

"No." Lister stood his ground. "That wasn't me, man."

"What do you mean? Your psi-moon landscape isn't your mind? Care to explain _that_ one?"

"It was, but it wasn't. It was of me, but it wasn't me. That's the problem with the psi-moon. It pulls out everything. I mean.." Lister flailed his hands in frustration. "I mean, you don't go 'round burnin' haiches into your head and electrocuting yerself. The psi-moon just brings out these nasty thoughts and urges that we all have, that we keep locked up in the back of our minds. It's not stuff we're actually gonna _do_."

"Ah, so you don't _actually_ want to rape me."

Lister was becoming irritated. The concept he was trying to express was not simple, and Rimmer was only making it more difficult. "Look, man, I met your low on the low ship. He wanted to whip me and take me, OK? So you want to do the same yerself - at some level."

Rimmer folded his arms and looked down.

Lister dragged his chair over and sat down across from Rimmer, backwards, his hands folded over the chair back.

"A word's been missin' since that happened."

"All sorts of words have been missing since that happened," Rimmer snapped

"Nah, just one," Lister said, stubbornly plunging forward. Rimmer looked up. "Sorry."

"You're _sorry_."

"I'm sorry that happened to you, I truly am. And I'm sorry that I was, in some ways, responsible." Lister paused, shaking a finger at Rimmer. "But I didn't _do_ it man, and that's important."

"Why?"

Lister sighed. "I don't want yeh to be afraid of me, Rimmer."

"Afraid?" Rimmer snorted. "I'm not afraid of you. I just don't trust you."

"Yeh, you're afraid I'll hurt you again. But I'm not going to, man. We had argued before we went moonhopping... hell, I can't even remember about what. But I was ticked at yeh. And so, some part in the back of my mind wanted to hurt you at the same time that I... want you." Lister barely choked out the last. Rimmer hadn't looked away, but his cheeks were flaming red. "That part shouldn't've come out the way it did, and it wouldn't've, if we hadn't hit that moon."

"Listy's correspondence course in psychoanalysis. Marvelous." But Rimmer's voice quavered slightly.

Lister sighed and sat down in his chair, his back to Rimmer. "I wish there was something I could do to make you trust me."

Only silence.

"Go to hard light, would yeh?"

Silence.

"Go to hard light, man." Lister swallowed. "Rimmer." He could feel that his own voice was starting to quaver. "_Please_."

After a pause, Lister heard that quiet whumph of energy that signaled the changeover. He turned around, and put his hand on the blue-uniformed Rimmer's cheek, for once wishing he wasn't wearing his bad-arse studded leather gloves. He could feel a muscle in Rimmer's jaw twitching nervously. "Trust me," he said, and leaned over the table and pressed his lips to Rimmer's. Very, very gently. They were soft, warm, slightly staticy, and tasted very faintly of mint. Lister had not expected them to be so delicious, and he would have loved nothing more than to suck them into his mouth and devour them. But he only pressed his own to them chastely for a moment, and then pulled back and let his hand drop. "You can trust me, man."

He pulled his chair back over to his side of the table and gathered up his knitting. To the side and behind him, he heard Rimmer get up, walk over to the bunk, pull out his book, and start to read - and he did not hear the sound of the conversion back to soft light.

Small steps.

And he discovered that the formless knitted blob served as a perfect hard-on concealer.


	3. Stress

**A/N: Comes right after Rimmerworld.**

Rimmer stared up at the ceiling of his bunk. Five hundred years and change trapped in a cell will leave you hungry for a change of scene, but he was not sure if a change of scene back to the Starbug's crew was truly what the doctor ordered. They were all _highly_ amused by his... adventure. He was in no mood to take it.

A glass of water sat on the floor nearby. He had been without any kind of food or drink for five hundred years (his myriad clones stopped feeding him in the hopes he would die; when he didn't, they just ignored him). The first sip of water he took, once back on board Starbug, had given him a thrill that was almost sexual in its intensity, and he thought that was the most pathetic thing he had ever heard of. An intense emotional sharing with a glass of water.

He twiddled his worry balls in his fingers. They just did not grind together satisfyingly anymore. After about two hundred and fifty years, they were only nominal - and it was all downhill after that. He had tried to get another set from Kryten, but the metal eunuch had assured him that those were the only pair on the ship. Space Corps regulation... something or other: In the event that more than one set of worry balls is required on a scout ship, commanding officer should plot an alternate route. And so he was stuck with a worryingly small set of worry balls.

Lister sat in a chair with his legs up on the folding table, reading a comic book with an intensity better suited to a political treatise. At the sound of the metal spheres clinking in Rimmer's fingers, he looked up. "Feel bad that you got no balls left?"

"Piercing wit, Listy. I thought that was a pretty good line about two hundred years ago."

"It's true, though. I never saw anyone do anything so cowardly."

They'd been through this before. Many, many times. These were the conversations that left Rimmer wanting the cell back again. "Well, I think I've paid for it," he said, shortly.

"You know..." Lister put down his comic. "I think you have. And I hope you've learned summit from it."

"What? Avoid simulant spaceships? Never clone alone?"

"Stick with your friends," Lister said, seriously. "You've always used people as stepping stones, Rimsy. We're not. Friends look out for each other, come what may."

Rimmer grimaced and tried again, unsuccessfully, to grind his worry balls. They slipped through his fingers and bounced to the floor. "Smegging hell." Rimmer flopped back on his bunk with an aggravated sigh.

"Time to find another stress release."

"Fire away."

Lister shrugged. "Physical stuff. I'd say runnin', but you do that anyway. Hot bath. Backrub - Kryten used to do that for the birds on the Nova 5. I'd say masturbatin', but you do that any..."

"Listy."

Lister giggled.

"Backrub? I wouldn't trust that Fullerene-headed gimp to knead a loaf of bread."

"It don't have to be him. I know a little massage. I read about it in a book."

"This wouldn't happen to be one of those books on naughty ways to please women?" Rimmer asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Nah, it's all straight and level. Some ancient Earth relaxation techniques - called tantra, or summing. Lemme show you."

Three reactions passed rapidly through Rimmer's mind. First - No smegging way. Second - Kryten's caution about possible death via stress. Third - The little BBs that had been his worry balls, now rolling around somewhere on the floor. "Fine. Show me."

Lister had turned back to his comic after the pause, and looked back up with some surprise. Evidently, he had gotten as far as Rimmer's first thought and stopped there. "OK, man, I'll try. Er... you have to lie on yer stomach, I think. And get rid of the pillow." As Rimmer, with what he hoped was obvious discomfort, pushed the pillow and blanket onto the floor and turned onto his stomach, Lister tossed his cap aside and scratched his wooly head. "Hrm - we need some oil, or the friction will rub yeh raw." He thought for a moment, and then, struck by lightning inspiration as if with a ballpeen hammer, started to root through the box that held his private stash of curry sauce, hot pickle, and chutney.

"Listy, _no_. I am _not_ going to have a tripe-hot madras backrub."

"Don' worry, man, I got it." Lister held up a small glass bottle. "Found it on the Simulant ship. Just fer you - Extra Virgin."

Rimmer dropped his face back onto the bunk with a loud thunk.

Lister walked over and sat on the edge of the bunk. Rimmer felt him tug at the neckline of his uniform jacket. "Gotta take yer kit off, man."

Rimmer concentrated and willed away his jacket and undershirt. Lister prodded at his back. "If you wus any stiffer, mate, you'd be dead." There was a pause, and Rimmer felt a cold drizzle on his back. He yelped.

"Easy, man," said Lister. He started to run his hands up and down Rimmer's back. Despite himself, Rimmer felt himself start to relax. The touch was just heavy enough to be past the point of tickling, but was still very gentle and superficial. As he relaxed, Lister probed harder, his fingers running over knots with a twang disturbingly reminiscent of his guitar playing. He moved back from one to the next and then back to the first, wearing them down slowly. Rimmer felt Lister's hands start to move outside of the back, traveling up Rimmer's neck to the hard knots at the base, over the shoulders, down the lower back to that horribly tense muscle below where the ribs terminate.

"Better?" Lister's voice seemed to drift in from somewhere far away.

"Murrrphle." It felt like a great deal of effort to be even that eloquent. Rimmer felt like a boned fish.

Lister's hands moved back to his neck. They were very, very gentle, now, almost soft, with warm breath behind them. They were, in fact, lips instead of hands, and Rimmer was too blissfully relaxed to do anything more than take in stride the fact that Lister was covering the back of his neck with butterfly kisses.

"Are you trying to seduce me, Mr. Robinson?" he mumbled.

"Yeah," said Lister, and the kisses began to move around to the side of Rimmer's neck; Lister's hands ran up and down his sides. When Rimmer put up no resistance, he felt the hands turn him over gently onto his back, and Lister pressed a kiss to his mouth. It was much as he remembered it from that one time before; a pervasive taste of nicotine, a light dusting of lager, and a very solid base of fiery curry. It was definitely the most interesting mouth Rimmer had ever kissed - not, he had to admit, that it took very long to line up the other contenders and compare them all. And he had to admit, if only to himself, that he had no knowledge of whether he was capable of delivering a _good_ kiss - although, if he had to guess, it would be that this fervent mashing together of lips that he had instigated by taking Lister under the armpits and pulling him closer was not it. But what the smeg; he was relaxed, he was excited, and this was Lister's idea anyway.

Lister certainly didn't seem to mind; he had crawled awkwardly into the bunk without letting go, and now straddled Rimmer with his hands moving up and down the hologram's bare and oily back. He pulled back slightly and opened his mouth. Rimmer started to ask a question, and Lister stuck his tongue into Rimmer's now open mouth. Well, that was an interesting development. Rimmer fiddled with the tongue while Lister's lips moved over his, and his hands moved lower, fromRimmer's bare back down tohis velour-clad buttocks, squeezing them together and grinding his own hips into Rimmer's. He was very obviously erect. But despite Rimmer's relaxed state, and the unexpected _fun_ of all of this, a small cold pit of worry and fear still sat in the base of his stomach - somewhere around the colon or appendix, he judged, and it kept him soft. He tentatively ran his hand through Lister's tightly curled hair, and Lister began to move madly against him, jamming his tongue deep into Rimmer's mouth. It was exciting in the uncontrolled manner of a rollercoaster - where one trusts to some benevolent deity who knows the laws of physics and humanity better than oneself that the fun will not turn into pain or death at any point. After a short while of this, Lister put his cheek to Rimmer's - an unexpectedly soft cheek, pleasant to the touch - and gasped, his whole body shuddering. He then lay still on top of Rimmer.

"Relaxed, man?"Lister murmured in his ear, eventually.

"Yes," Rimmer was surprised to reply. He was tingly, and somewhat nervously thrilled, but he was not, strictly speaking, stressed out anymore.

"Good." Lister fished the pillow out from where it sat, discarded, on the ground, stuffed it under Rimmer's head, grabbed the blanket, threw it over them, and promptly started to snore.

Rimmer grimaced. The goit actually was going to fall asleep in his bunk? Next to him? Rimmer started to fish for the energy to get his dangerously relaxed and limp body out of the bunk.

Lister grumbled, turned, flung an arm over Rimmer's chest, and started to snore again.

Well, if he told Lister off now, the goit would miss out on it. Besides, if he waited until Lister woke up, that would give him more time to compose his rant. Satisfied, Rimmer settled next to Lister's warm body and drifted off.


	4. Competition

Notes: Part 1 comes before Out Of Time; part 2 is during Tikka To Ride. Lister's tattoo is canon (from a Psirens deleted scene).

_Rimmer: I'm a competitive man, Kryten; always have been. That's what makes me what I am."  
Kryten: "We're all perfectly well aware of what you are, sir."_

-Rimmerworld

Lister sat on his bunk with a foil tray with the remains of the evening's mutton vindaloo in it. His normal midsection meal had been truncated by Cat's speculation on possible nasty fates that would befall the next crew member to vent air in either a belch or a fart. He, Kryten, and Rimmer had turned pointedly towards Lister. Lister thought it highly unfair; OK, he might have been a little gassier than usual, but did that really merit ejection from the midsection? Apparently, it did, and he dropped the poppadums into the tray, picked it up in one hand and the second can of lager, half-full, in the other, and walked back to the crew's quarters. Cat's offer to take the evening shift came drifting down the corridor behind him, and he snorted.

He was picking the last bits of mutton out of the thick sauce in which they were swimming when the door slid open and Rimmer walked in. Lister immediately exaggerated his lack of table manners, lifting the mutton bits over his head and dropping them into his open mouth, then sucking the sauce obscenely off of his stained fingers. Mission accomplished as Rimmer's nostrils flared. Lister laughed.

"You _like_ being disgusting, don't you?"

"Yeah, man," Lister replied, starting to lick the sauce from the bottom of the tray. "It's fun."

Rimmer sat in a bunk across from Lister and watched. Lister met his eyes and stretched his tongue out farther, to get the sauce out of every cranny.

"You know, a weaker man might be moved to examine his faith in your fidelity. You seem to have a strong sexual bond to curry. You've had a relationship with it that eclipses the duration of any human relationship."

"Me and curry - we go way back." Lister finished the last drips of sauce and tossed the tray in the waste bin. "But yeh knew that before you got inno this."

"I wonder," said Rimmer, lying back and looking at the ceiling of the bunk, "if you had to choose between curry and me, which would you pick?"

"Both," said Lister, firmly. He walked over and wiped his right hand on Rimmer's cheek, leaving streaks of curry sauce. He climbed on top of Rimmer, straddling him, and licked every drop off. Rimmer's face crinkled in disgust. Lister laughed and wiped his left hand down Rimmer's neck, then buried his face in the junction between head and shoulder, licking and sucking off the sauce. He started to tug at Rimmer's dark blue pants, and Rimmer grabbed his wrists. "You are _not_ putting curry sauce _there_." Lister sighed - and then put his fingers in his mouth, one at a time, and sucked them clean. By the time he was halfway through the second hand, Rimmer was pulling at his vest and popping buttons on his long johns. Lister laughed, and plunged a fiery curry-lager tongue in Rimmer's mouth.

xxxxxx

Some time later, Lister was sated in every way, and ready to drift off to sleep. But Rimmer's feather-light touch on his buttock tickled, and kept him awake. "Stop it, man," he muttered sleepily, swatting at Rimmer's hand.

"Just admiring your one unbending love," Rimmer said, in a voice that was not one bit sleepy, and Lister realized he was tracing the heart on Lister's tattoo. Lister sighed and rolled over onto his back. "I bet you wouldn't be able to live without curries."

"Why would I want to live without curries?"

"Maybe so the rest of us wouldn't have to wake up every morning swimming at the bottom of a fetid sea of flatulence?"

"You're gonna wake up in a fetid sea of flatulence, and you're gonna like it." He put his head to the side. "I don't love any _one_ curry," he said. "I just love curries. Like you love that stupid salute. Go to sleep." He immediately suited action to word. And as deep a sleeper as Lister is, he did not hear the soft whump of Rimmer turning to soft light, or feel the gentle brush of electricity as he exited the bunk through Lister and walked to the midsection.

xxxxxx

Lister sat in the midsection the next morning. He defined morning as when he took his breakfast, as there was no real definition of daytime in space. This arrangement suited Lister perfectly; when on a planet, people could always point to the sun as proof that it was afternoon, while up here, he could point to his bowl as proof that it was morning. He asked Cat to pass the Tabasco. Cat did not look up from his fashion magazine as he slid the bottle across the table. "Why does this magazine have so many naked women in it? Man, peach is totally five years ago!"

Lister looked over. "Oh, sorry, Cat; I hid my dirty magazine in that one." He pulled the dog-eared insert out of Cat's magazine and tossed it on the other end of the table.

"Ah, that's better!" said Cat. "I need some inspiration. I'm down to fifty suits - I need to find a way to change some of the clothes we found on the Simulant ship up to my level of fashion."

"Cat, don't tell me you took clothes off of the dead bodies in the cells."

"Nah, those stains _never_ come out. But the handcuff links make good earrings!" He pulled his hair back to show them off.

Rimmer walked out of the cockpit. "Changeover."

"I'm eatin'," Lister told his bowl.

"I'm readin'," Cat told the magazine.

Rimmer folded his arms and sighed. "Well, be sure to tell the next asteroid we run into that you're busy, and could it please stop by to smash the ship at a more convenient time?" When this speech elicited no response, he leaned over the table, took the fashion magazine in one thumb and forefinger, jerked it out of Cat's hands, and flipped it into the cockpit. He raised his eyebrows at Cat, and walked back to the quarters.

Cat flipped an obscene gesture at his retreating back. "What a smeghead. How did you live with him and not throttle him?"

Lister scraped the bottom of the bowl with his spoon. "You know, I spent as li'le time as possible with him when we was back on the Dwarf and everyone was alive. I think I woulda throttled him otherwise."

The two of them walked into the cockpit and took their positions. Cat pulled out his magazine, and Lister put his feet up on the control panel, carefully settling his heel between two buttons that it would be very bad to push. "He changed a lot after he died, though."

Cat sniffed. "Yeah, people _do_ tend to change a lot after they die. Most of them have the good sense to change into corpses, though, and _stop talking_."

"Nah, man, I'm serious. He's changed for the better. Yeah, he's still an anal-retentive cowardly irritating self-satisfied pilea smeg, but at least he knows other people exist, now, and actually acts as if they matter from time to time. _Nothing_ mattered to him back before, yeh know. He cared about as much fer people as fer a bog roll. Use and discard. He keeps goin' on about how he'd love to be alive again, but now - well, he's better than he was when he was alive."

"Well, that's one point where we agree," said Cat. "Neither of us wants him alive." He turned back to his magazine. "You know, I wonder if entrails would go well with a mauve number like this? I found this great jacket back on the ship, but I just can't get the guts out..."

xxxxxx

The walk back up to the midsection from the newly expanded cargo decks was long, and both of the crew members who required wind were winded. Cat walked ahead, and sat at the midsection table, wiping his brow. Rimmer felt a tug on his sleeve as he followed; Lister caught his eyes, raised his eyebrows, and nodded towards the quarters. "Sex and death, man - who says they have to happen once in a lifetime?" Wordlessly, Rimmer yanked his sleeve out of Lister's hand and walked ahead, grateful that Lister did not try to follow him as he walked through the midsection to the cockpit and started to run wholly unnecessary system checks.

He hated to admit it, but the encounter with his future selves had shaken a very fundamentally weaselly part of him. The end result of following his natural inclinations had been disgusting, unlikable, and altogether grotesque. Respect for some things, he decided grudgingly, had to take precedence over his desires, from here on out. And causality and the natural balance of the universe would have to rank very high on that list of 'some things.' He wouldn't touch a time drive now with a pole any shorter than he'd use to fish a sock out of Lister's laundry hamper. And, although his desire to somehow bring himself back to life had become rather less of a priority since his hard-light drive, certainly enough to put it respectably below his 'some things' list, he would be lying to himself if he told himself that it did not matter. And although he did not expect this to be the first thing on Lister's mind, either, it disgusted him to the electronic marrow that he was _bumped_ down the list of considerations in favor of the one true love of Lister's life.

Lister was wholly willing to violate the laws of time, space, physics, and causality - not to bring life back to his lover, but for...

_Curry_.


	5. Right

"Isn't that right, Ace?"

Lister sat in front of him, holding Ace's defunct lightbee, staring into his eyes with a curious intensity.

Yes, isn't that right. Isn't it right that, with one sentence, you have denied my choice of my future?

Isn't it right that we hated each other for years in life, and hated each other for many years more even after my death?

Isn't it right that I had as little respect for you as you had for me? That my anal-retentiveness and cowardice grated on your nerves as much as your slovenliness and persistent optimism grated on mine?

It must be right that we never got beyond this. That you never entered my mind made flesh and saw my deepest fears and most tenacious insecurities, and held anything but contempt for me afterwards. It must be right that the love in your eyes as your hand found my knee was a sham, meant solely to save the ones you truly care about. You are a good actor, my friend.

It must be right that those same wide brown eyes didn't sparkle with sensual mischief after you tentatively prodded my new hard-light drive. Isn't it right that later, after we had sealed the hole in Starbug that the star-drive made, that your confession over a beer that your room wasn't exactly perfect in _every_ detail was referring to the absence of Kochanski? It must have been.

Isn't it right that we never grappled like desperate teenagers, only half-naked, in my bunk, you coming with your trousers still on? That was a dream of mine, I know it. A particularly vivid one, but I do have those. The warmth of your breath in my ear, and the way you pulled me in hard against your groin with both hands on my bare back, were particularly good details for me to have added, I think.

It must be right that I made up every time since then, as well. Every gasp of yours in my ear, every "Rimsy..." breathed with love and desire. The things I did that I never would have dreamed of doing before - merely because I knew that if I ran my fingers down _there_, and grasped _here_, hard, while nipping your ear and licking your neck, it would make my name turn into incoherent moans that sounded like prayer - those things must have been fevered ramblings of an overactive and undersexed imagination. That time that I was too coy, and you ripped off my blue top, hologrammatic buttons disappearing with a fizzle as they flew off - isn't it right that this was just a very good dream? Because in reality, you never would have kissed me that hard, pressing my back in those two spots you found that make me jelly in your hands, then turned me over, grabbed my buttocks and licked them until I was making wild promises to do anything you asked if you would just _get in_ - and then buggered me until I thought I would make a dent in the bunk.

Isn't it right that your footsteps on the metal stairway behind me are not going to precede a request for me to stay, a declaration of love, a touch of a hand to my cheek? Those are acts of one who cares, and isn't it right that you never did?

After all, I am a hologram, an emotionless, soulless simulation of a human being you used to hate - so long ago that you would have forgotten why by now if I had not been resurrected to remind you of it all. I do not have a heart to break, any more than a toaster or a spacesuit or a toilet bowl. The thing in my chest that feels like it's breaking is a computer simulation of a heart, and if it fails completely, you know that the guarantee is still valid. You can trade me in on a better model, or just get your money back, isn't that right?

Everything I love leaves me - we both know how right that is. And perhaps, now, it is time for me to do the leaving first, for once in my life. That way, I will only have myself to blame. And I know you want it that way, or you would not be encouraging me so strongly. When I leave, you will sleep soundly at night, not missing a warm hard-light body next to you, free at last from your neurotic bunkmate who has followed you past death twice, through the stars, through other realities, like an irritating rash that will not go away. You will, finally, be free to live the life you want, not one with me.

Isn't that right, Listy?


	6. Fun

Off you go, smeghead. It was fun.

Wasn't it?

Damn, I sure hope so, because I never heard from your lips one way or the other.

I get so wrapped up in being the last man alive, sometimes, that I forget you're the last man not-alive. I have survivor's guilt, m'self; I've read up onnit, and though they say it's normal, I look out on the stars and, once in a while, wonder what the smeg fate were thinking when they picked me as the last representative of humanity. They must be having a laugh. So you, you mess of a guilt-ridden man, what do you have when you look out of window at that same big, lonely starscape and your face sags, like every muscle has just given up, like I know mine must when it all hits me like a roundhouse punch in the ego; what are you feeling, non-survivor's guilt?

You're the only man I know who would be able to feel guilty about not surviving an accident.

Then again, I'm the one who felt guilty when his subconscious raped the man who feels guilty about not having survived. I guess we're even in the nutter department.

Yeh got some of the biggest, strongest fences around your psyche of anyone I've known. I don't know that I ever got yer to _talk_. I mean, for real. You love to pull down other people, and yer so easily pulled down yerself - it's like you know you're going to drown, so you're happy to just pull down whoever you can get your hands on so you won't be alone at the bottom.  
But not being alone at the top is something I don't think yer ever considered.

Yeah, I'm a horny bloke, and the sex was great. And maybe that's all it was; you have a body that was made to be touched, for such an uptight virginal bastard, and you were so tight it made me scream, and once you got over yer nervousness, you knew just where to touch me, too. But...

I always did the reaching out, man. I tried. I was the first one to touch, the first one to kiss. I bloody well seduced you, the first time we.. went there. I just went forward as long as I didn't hear a no. But I never knew if that were a yes - or just not a no. That last step, that one place we never went - I didn't make that step because I wanted to know if you would. I forced every other step, dammit; I dinn' wanna force that one. I didn't want to be the first one to say I love you.

I dunno if I wanted you because I had been alone for so long and wuz desperate - or if I had been alone with you for so long that it finally opened me eyes to you. All I know is that the look of your face as you staggered out of bed, still half-asleep, fishing for clean shorts and socks on the floor before realizing you were dead and your clothes were in your mind, wuz so beautiful that it made my heart ache, and I thought I would burst if I didn't jest say it. Make you sit down in a chair and tell you how you make the stars dim; tell you how lovely you are until even you had to believe it. I would sit up, instead, and strain the dips out of last night's flat lager and take a sip, knowing it would make your forehead knot and your nostrils flare. And I would look outta the window at the stars, and try to see Orion. I never could see the constellations as they were supposed to be from Earth, but I see them everywhere out here, where they change all of the time.

Yer tall enough that it was usually more comfortable for me to put my head on your chest when we fell asleep. And it was odd, not feeling a heartbeat. You give off a thrum of electricity; it's soothin', but it was eerie. And not havin' a human heart beating away next to me - well, it couldn't help but make me wonder if there was a human there at all. If this... thing that we're doin' might be something Holly programmed in when he revived you, another aspect of keepin' me sane. If I asked if yeh loved me, would wake some dusty subroutine kept dormant for centuries against just that question, bringing out a preprogrammed 'yes?'

I just wanted to know, fer sure, no questions. You never let me know. So I let you go.

Sometimes, though, when I'm alone in my bed - again - and I can't sleep, I wonder if yeh would have told me if a hologram aches when he's alone, like a human does.  
If I had asked.


End file.
